


Hunter's Dust

by sulkstiel (seriousface)



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:33:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seriousface/pseuds/sulkstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(In this chapter)- Dean's arrived first at a safehouse Bobby pointed him to, and he's waiting for Sam to arrive. Mostly this is a bunch of reflection on the hunting life. Dean finds something another hunter left behind, and is cast back into a distant memory that will be explored in the next chapter. (This work, however long it works out to be, has the potential to eventually become destiel-y.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunter's Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Still not entirely sure of the setting, probably during season 5 or... or not. While I do have some inkling of future chapters, I have no idea where it will ultimately go. So we're seeing this for the first time together, you and I. /stretches and casually lays arm around your shoulder

"I haven't... I haven't touched one of these in years."

Gingerly Dean's fingers closed around the neck, the other hand cradling the narrow waist like a lover's as he moved to perch on the foot of the bed. He rested it across his lap and drew the flat of his hand along its length, picking up years of dust.

"Not since Sammy was a kid."

-

It was a safe place, Bobby had said, a safe place to hole up and wait for Sam. The peeling walls were layered with nearly every kind of proofing sigil, the store room in the back stocked with salt and holy water; silver, iron, countless wooden stakes; propane and matches and lighters and a modest stash of canned goods and protein bars. Just in case. A closet by the bathroom had a filing cabinet filled with a selection of photocopied exorcisms and basic resources on common monsters. Just in case. Musty from disuse, but meticulously organized.

Just in case, every tattered rug had a devil's trap on its underside. Just in case, an iron rod lay behind every door.

It had been years since anyone used the place - long enough that there were no Enochian sigils. The last time anyone threw back a beer on the sunken couch in the tiny living-room-slash-kitchen, angels were myth and demons a threatening rarity.

 

Dean kicked aside shotgun shells from another time. Two empty beer bottles still stood on the table, as if someone had been momentarily distracted and neglected to return to the room before leaving. There was a narrow bed in the room opposite, and Dean tossed his bags through the open door. Feet heavy, he made his way to the couch, groaning as he fell into it, the cushions sighing under his weight and dust rising from the sun-bleached cover. He dug his flask out and saluted the empty bottles on the table before taking a swig.

"Ramble on, brothers."

-

It was a house of healing for hunters. A place to disappear to. A luxury seldom afforded, but not for want of reason. Hunters couldn't ask for vacations, not really. The only time a safehouse weekend became a necessity was when the hits were coming too hard and too fast.

It was a house of healing. First aid in the kitchen cupboards instead of dishes stacked high. Anonymity for a day or two, maybe a week, just enough to patch up, to catch a breath, to regroup, to sit and think and plan, or just to sleep for a few hours without seeing black eyes, black smoke, black nightmare snarls.

But these safehouse vacations, no one asked for them. Not really. And keeping up invisibility afters days or weeks or months of hits, it was like watching a candle burn. Forced inactivity, captivity while the world outside looms larger and darker every day. A little slice of paradise where you go to do the part of your job outside of the job. Heal. While things fall apart. Heal. Don't look outside the window. Don't walk outside the door. Don't help.

Until you're on your feet, don't bother chasing anything. Until you see straight again, don't bother driving. Don't bother fighting. Until you've stopped, don't bother bleeding.

The way to sit and wait is to keep your hands busy and to tell yourself your thoughts are light. They're not, of course, but tell yourself anyway.

Clean your guns and clean them again. Pack twenty salt rounds. Thirty. Leaf through the exorcisms and memorize them forwards, backwards. Touch up the devil's traps.

If you're not alone, play cards. Talk about things that happened a hundred demons ago. Or sit in the comfortable silence of so many years shared that there's nothing new to tell.

-

When his eyes opened it was almost night, the last rays of sun poking through the trees and lighting the window sill above the couch, the dust particles casting shadow hairs over the blistered and yellowed white. Dean winced as he sat up, cracked ribs biting or half-healed cuts pulling open again. No Sam yet. No Cas.

He stood and his knees creaked. He raised his arms and his shoulders popped, the jolt reverberating sharply across one side. _Ribs it is, then._

He crossed the room and leaned into the one adjacent. Talking to no one, to the empty space, he fumbled in the thickening darkness. "The hell is the damn light..." Splayed fingers sweeping over crisscrossing symbology from every faith and language, the interior decor of a hunter, one side of the perpetual dialogue between the brothers fell unanswered from his lips, "worse than a damn crypt...” The light flicked on and the tiny room felt tinier with every corner outlined and every sharp shadow stark.

He moved the bags to the creaking bed and unzipped them, continuing the one-sided conversation, "Who needs thank-yous anyway?" Dumping out a pile of shirts, "Nothing like an unsung hero." He turned to the closet and slid the doors open, hooting at the ancient washer-dryer duo crammed together in the small space. "Ah, Bobby," Dean clapped his hands, "man's a saint!" He threw the bloody, grimy pile into the cream coloured washer and dug around in search of detergent. The same dime-a-dozen generic powder packets he'd grown up using. The same stuff in those aluminum dispensers at every laundromat. The same stuff that he'd learned to stretch, doing laundry for himself and Sammy while their dad was gone. In the laundry room in the dorms at Stanford, it was the same bottom-of-the-rack stuff Sam chose over the bright name brand boxes heading the lineup.

He turned the dial and stopped short of punching the start button. "Wait up for ya, Sammy."

Outside, the trees whispered to each other as a sunset breeze dragged their tangled branches. Dean walked past the bed to close the brittle shutters, grating over residual rock salt. When he faced the room again, his eye fell on the golden belly of a guitar peeking out from underneath the bed, caked in a downy layer of white dust. "Look at you," he knelt to peek at its slender neck, puffs of dust crowding around the tuners. Some well loved companion a hunter had used - to keep his hands busy, to tell himself his thoughts were light - and then left behind because the trunk was for guns, the back seat too dark for six strings and a voice that sounds like home.

The way he reached for it was the way you reach out your hand to a cat you don't know. Slow. Unsure. Coaxing and cooing like the memory he was clinging to could shatter or disappear at any moment. "I haven't..." The dust under the bed ebbed in response to his movement, "I haven't touched one of these in years..." And as he pulled it out, holding it like it was made of glass, as he sat on the bed and wiped down its brown-bitten strings, he recalled, "Not since Sammy was a kid."


End file.
